Donald Juel Volume

July 4, 2011

I’ve just received a comp copy of a newly-published volume of essays and sermons by the late Donald Juel (1942-2003), who finished up as Professor of New Testament in Princeton Theological Seminary. Don was a much-loved teacher of his students and a much-loved colleague of those of us who knew him as a fellow scholar.

The new volume = Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Shane Berg & Matthew L. Skinner (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011). It includes eight of Don’ s previously published essays, here conveniently brought together, along with eight of his sermons (transcribed lovingly from audio recordings).

Don was most well known in NT scholarship for his studies on the Gospel of Mark, beginning with his published PhD thesis focused on the Markan passion narrative, Messiah and Temple (1977), essays thereafter, and on through his later small volume, Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted (1994). He also produced a stimulating book on early Christian use of the OT: Messianic Exegesis: Christological Interpretation of the Old Testament in Early Christianity (1988).

As the editors note, Don was a wonderful combination of a skilled exegete with finger-tip sensitivity to the literary properties of the texts he engaged, and also a profound theological reader of biblical texts. I commend this volume to anyone with similar interests, or anyone who would like simply to see this kind of dedicated and probing engagement, whether his scholarly essays or his thoughtful sermons.